The Ethics of Sightseeing [Hardcover]

Is travel inherently beneficial to human character? Does it automatically educate and enlighten while also promoting tolerance, peace, and understanding? In this challenging book, Dean MacCannell identifies and overcomes common obstacles to ethical sightseeing. Through his unique combination of personal observation and in-depth scholarship, MacCannell ventures into specific tourist destinations and attractions: picturesque rural and natural landscapes, hip urban scenes, historic locations of tragic events, Disney theme parks, beaches, and travel poster ideals. He shows how strategies intended to attract tourists carry unintended consequences when they migrate to other domains of life and reappear as staged authenticity. Demonstrating each act of sightseeing as an ethical test, the book shows how tourists can realize the productive potential of their travel desires, penetrate the collective unconscious, and gain character, insight, and connection to the world.

Dean MacCannellis Professor Emeritus of Environmental Design at the University of California, Davis, and is the author ofThe Tourist(UC Press).

List of Illustrations
Preface
Prologue: I Was a Tourist at Freud House, London

Part One. The Ubiquitous Tourist and Postmodern Paranoia
1 Tourist/Other and the Unconscious
2 Staged Authenticity Today

Part Two. Recent Trends in Research and the New Moral Tourism
3 Why Sightseeing?
4 Toward an Ethics of Sightseeing
5 Trips and Their Reason

Part Three. City and Countryside as Symbolic Constructs
6 The Tourist in the Urban Symbolic
7 Looking Through the Landscape

Part Four. The Imagination Versus the Imaginary
8 An Imaginary Symbolic: From Piranesi to Disney
9 The Touristic Attitude: Acceding to the Imaginary
10 The Bilbao Effect: Ethical Symbolic Representation
11 Painful Memory
12 The Intentional Structure of Tourisló“